Marketing strategies for refurbished products: Survey-based insights for probabilistic selling and technology level

摘要

The selling of refurbished products is considered a sustainable practice for businesses looking for strategies to improve their market image. However, companies still struggle to sell refurbished products for different reasons ranging from consumer's attitudes towards refurbished products to in-efficient pricing policies adopted by remanufacturing and manufacturing companies due to the lack of understanding of the actual market of refurbished products. This impacts the profitability of the remanufacturing industry on a large scale. This paper aims to discuss the importance of understanding the market of the refurbished product and the role of consumer purchase behavior. With an emphasis on the refurbished cellphone market, this study has run a survey analysis to test several hypotheses about consumer's viewpoint toward refurbished electronics and identify marketing strategies that may benefit promoting the sale of refurbished consumer electronics in the market. The survey analysis results suggest that consumers' willingness to pay for refurbished cellphones depends on the degree of the technological obsolescence of the product. Consumer's willingness to purchase refurbished cellphones is higher for more technologically obsolete products. Also, the use of probabilistic selling or opaque selling might be a good strategy for selling refurbished products. Therefore, companies may consider using opaque selling as a marketing strategy since consumer choice decisions would change when dealing with an uncertain deal or probabilistic deals.